Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Bailout bill to rise from the ashes in the Senate today

Pictured: The Bailout Bill (top, above Colossus)

Monday the House defeated the initial bailout bill, but it has since been slightly revised and will be voted on in the Senate later today. Also, Barack Obama, John McCain and Joe Biden have all SUSPENDED THEIR CAMPAIGNS to go to Washington to vote on it today. Or they didn't, because that would be a pointless stunt. Biden still plans on showing up to debate Sarah Palin tomorrow night, because he's not putting Country First.

So how is this bill different from Monday's failed legislation? Let ABC News tell it.

The new Senate version of the bailout was sweetened Tuesday night by additions that would allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to raise the amount of bank deposits it insures from $100,000 to $250,000, a move expected to help small businesses.

The Senate bill also includes tax breaks for businesses and the middle class, something the Senate has been trying to pass for the past several years and which the House has rejected because the Senate does not include corresponding cuts to make up the difference in the budget.

So we got the FDIC cap raised (something both candidates said they favored yesterday) and some additional tax breaks. This is supposedly to get more Republican support for the bill, even if it loses some Democratic support. It's expected to pass, but that's what they said on Monday. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, . . . can't get fooled again.

1 comment:

I wouldn’t be surprised if the recent overhaul of bankruptcy legislation was designed for this economic situation; it turns human debtors into indentured servants. And that is necessary for the following reason:

The ’sssssss’ we are noticing with this credit crunch is just the leak before the big burst. This credit bubble has been inflated by a logorithmic base 10 scale of dollar creation.The practice of using 90% of ‘real’ wealth for lending that can then be invested and re-deposited for recycling again and again for more and more credit probably has the same effect of simply printing more money. The difference between those two ways of creating wealth is that creating money by credit inflation redistributes wealth for the benefit of financiers. And printed money is real; not fake.

This credit bubble burst should, then, be creating a shortage of money. And the cure may be as simple as the government printing more money. The only problem with that scheme is that there would not be another bubble to burst to correct for over-inflation. Printed dollars don’t evaporate away like the ones the financiers are trying to sell taxpayers now.

And that is why those who have engineered this bubble need those new draconian bankruptcy laws. Only wage earners can turn this fake money into real wealth. And that is why the Bush administration and other supporters of the great bailout plan are adamantly against giving bankruptcy judges the right to restructure debt according to who is most responsible for making bad loans.